Kla Chiefs Accused Of Killing Off Their Rivals

June 25, 1999|By Chris Hedges, New York Times News Service.

The senior commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which has signed an agreement with NATO to disarm, carried out assassinations, arrests and purges within their ranks to thwart potential rivals, say current and former commanders in the rebel army and some Western diplomats.

The campaign, in which as many as a half-dozen top rebel commanders were shot dead, was directed by Hashim Thaci and two of his lieutenants, Azem Syla and Xhavit Haliti, these officials said. Thaci denied through a spokesman that he was responsible for any killings.

Although the United States has long been wary of the KLA, the rebel group has become the main ethnic Albanian power in Kosovo.

Rebel commanders supplied NATO with target information during the bombing campaign. Now, after the war, the United States and other NATO powers have effectively made partners of Thaci and the KLA in the rebuilding of Kosovo. The agreement NATO signed with Thaci, for example, envisions turning the KLA into a civilian police force and leaves open the possibility that the KLA could become a provisional army modeled on the National Guard in the United States.

While none of the KLA officials interviewed witnessed Thaci or his aides execute anyone, they recounted episodes in which Thaci's rivals were killed shortly after Thaci or one of his aides had threatened them with death.

"When the war started, everyone wanted to be the chief," said Rifat Haxhijaj, 30, a former lieutenant in the Yugoslav army who left the rebel movement last September and now lives in Switzerland. "For the leadership, this was never just a war against Serbs--it was also a struggle for power."

Thaci's representative in Switzerland, Jashae Salihu, denied accounts of assassinations. "These kind of reports are untrue," he said. "Neither Thaci nor anyone else from the KLA is involved in this kind of activity. Our goal has been to establish a free Kosovo and nothing more."

The accusations of assassinations and purges were made in interviews with about a dozen former and current Kosovo Liberation Army officials, two of whom said they had witnessed executions of Thaci's rivals. Similar charges also were leveled by a former senior diplomat for the Albanian government, a former police official in the Albanian government who worked with the rebel group and several Western diplomats.

But the State Department Wednesday challenged some aspects of these accounts. "We simply don't have information to substantiate allegations that there was a KLA-leadership-directed program of assassinations or executions," said State Department spokesman James Rubin.

Rubin said he could not exclude the possibility that the rebel leaders were somehow tied to the killings. But he said Wednesday that the department officials had checked a wide range of sources in the previous 24 hours and could not confirm the accusations.

A senior State Department official and a Western diplomat in the Balkans, citing intelligence reports and extensive contacts with KLA officials inside and outside Kosovo, said they were aware of executions of midlevel officers suspected of collaborating with the Serbs, but said they had no evidence to link those killings with Thaci.

Former and current KLA officials also charge that a campaign of assassinations was carried out in close cooperation with the Albanian government, which often placed agents from the Albanian secret police at the disposal of the rebel commanders.

Rubin said the State Department did not have any information to suggest that the KLA leadership directed an execution program in conjunction with the Albanian security services.

Two former rebel leaders and a former Albanian police official, interviewed in Tirana, said that Haliti, who is officially Thaci's ambassador to Albania, was working in Kosovo with 10 secret police agents from Albania to form an internal security network that would be used to silence dissenters in Kosovo.

Thaci, 30, has named a government, with himself as prime minister, and denounced Ibrahim Rugova, who for nearly a decade was the self-styled president of Kosovo and ran a successful campaign of non-violent protest after the Serbs stripped Kosovo of its autonomy in 1989.